One-Dollar Bus Trips to Chicago Starting in April

According to an article in the dispatch over the weekend, megabus.com is going to start offering roundtrip tickets from Columbus to Chicago in April for as little as $1. That’s right… ONE DOLLAR. The trip also includes a stop in Indianapolis.

The bus terminal will most likely be located at COTA’s north terminal downtown at the corner of Spring & Wall streets. Tickets will only be available for purchase online.

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Walker is the co-founder of ColumbusUnderground.com and TheMetropreneur.com along with his wife and business partner Anne Evans. Walker has turned local media from a hobby into a full time career over the past decade and serves on multiple boards and committees throughout the community.

I priced it for leaving April 14 and arriving at home April 17. Then I looked up hotel information. It would be $32.50 for the bus (not bad at all… and it’s all during the day since I can’t sleep on buses), $130 +tax for the 3 night hotel stay, and then I figured in about $100 in spending money. That’s a great little trip for less than $300! Unfortunatly, we can’t find a babysitter. We are going to try again for sometime around our anniversary :D

I was just playing around with the site. If you leave Columbus on a Thursday night, get to Chicago Friday morning, spend all day Friday in Chicago, go to Minneapolis Friday night, spend Saturday in Minn, back to Chicago Saturday night or Sunday morning, back to Columbus on Sunday, you will spend $4 per person and never have to rent a hotel room if you sleep on the bus.

Big_Ben wrote I was just playing around with the site. If you leave Columbus on a Thursday night, get to Chicago Friday morning, spend all day Friday in Chicago, go to Minneapolis Friday night, spend Saturday in Minn, back to Chicago Saturday night or Sunday morning, back to Columbus on Sunday, you will spend $4 per person and never have to rent a hotel room if you sleep on the bus.

Would be something to do for a weekend :p

lol, I’ve been out of college for just over a year and a half, and this already sounds like more than I’d be willing to put up with. Just charge me the $100-something for a good hotel =)

you can get good hotels in the city for a respectable price. Teresa and I stayed downtown about a month or two ago for extremely reasonable pricing. We were close enough to walk down to Michigan Ave (magnificent mile) area and our cab ride to the hotel from the Zentra club area was only $18.00 (not bad for city cab prices). I think we were at a Holiday Inn in the business district, kinda by University of Chicago. If anyone is interested in the actual hotel info just PM me and I’ll track it down for you.

A bus service between Columbus and Chicago with rates as low as $1 starts in April. How long does it take before the service is canceled?

If you answered less than two months, youÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d be right.

megabus.com, which began carrying passengers between several Midwestern cities and Chicago on April 10, will end service in central Ohio on June 5.

Service from Chicago to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St. Louis will continue amid growing interest. But only about a quarter as many passengers used megabus.com from Columbus than in the companyÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s next-smallest markets, said Dale Moser, president and chief operating officer of the Stagecoach Group, megabus.comÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s United Kingdom-based parent.

“It wasnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t as successful as we had hoped when all of the other cities have just had very, very strong demand,” he said. “We havenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t come up with any one reason why (Columbus) has not done well.”

I don’t think I ever saw a single advertisement for this service. And almost every person I mentioned it to had never heard anything about it. I’m not sure if they had the same lack of marketing in other cities, but I don’t know how this could do well anywhere when you don’t tell anyone about it…

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Walker is the co-founder of ColumbusUnderground.com and TheMetropreneur.com along with his wife and business partner Anne Evans. Walker has turned local media from a hobby into a full time career over the past decade and serves on multiple boards and committees throughout the community.